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Guy Steeves: Grow Your Nonprofit with Email & Social Media

Are you seeking the right strategies, tools and tactics to make your marketing efforts as effective as possible? During this session you’ll learn some simple but powerful tips to help get your messages opened and read, shared and socially visible. And you’ll learn about great tools you can use to help engage with your existing supporters as well as expand your reach to new ones.

Welcome, and thank you for coming today…we’ve got a great session planned, with a little bit of marketing theory, a whole lot of practical marketing tips. This session is about how you can use email marketing and social media to grow your business or organization.[click to next slide]

Presenter should introduce themselves. RDDs should mention Constant Contact ALEs would mention their own company and clarify their relationship to Constant Contact.(Ask people in the room if any of them have ever attended a previous seminar. If there are a lot,Clarify that this is new content but that some of the same strategies we have taught in the past still applySo they might see a few familiar strategies or tips along the way. (Then mention the workbook – explain what it is, briefly, and let them know that you will refer to itThroughout the session with short exercises for them to complete. Next ask …)How many people in the room are small businesses or work for a small business?How many are nonprofits ….on purpose (they will laugh) relate to the room that you know it’s been a tough year for some and that the informationCovered in the session should help them start to move the needle.

Canada and UK versions – Email, EventSpot, Social Campaigns and Survey only

Marketing has changed….maybe you’ve noticed? How many of you use [click to build] Facebook for business? How many are on Linked In? Twitter? Anyone tweetingright now? (remind of twitter handle) [click to build] Who uses Pinterest? Instagram? YouTube?[click to build] And how many have checked your email today? (all hands up) …. [click to next slide]Mobile stat from: research from:email open by platform: https://litmus.com/blog/email-client-market-share-stats-infographic-june-2012

Marketing has changed….maybe you’ve noticed? How many of you use [click to build] Facebook for business? How many are on Linked In? Twitter? Anyone tweetingright now? (remind of twitter handle) [click to build] Who uses Pinterest? Instagram? YouTube?[click to build] And how many have checked your email today? (all hands up) …. [click to next slide]Mobile stat from: research from:email open by platform: https://litmus.com/blog/email-client-market-share-stats-infographic-june-2012

(Maybe throw in the back fence from engagement slide here) We used to tell people over the back fence, nowWe tell everyone – our family, our friends, our colleagues, our clients, old highschool boyfriends/girlfriends, grandparents, teens.We have flipped the funnel – it’s less about spending all of your time/money and energy finding new customers and more about fully engaging your existing happy customers and making it easy for them to tell others. The changes have leveled the playing field for smaller organizations to compete with the big boys….[click to next slide]

Email is hard to beat for real marketing value. And it’s very much a part of social media. Email is how you can monetize your social media activities.And it still has the highest delivery and response, much higher than social media.In addition to the actual email, there are a number of tools you can use to expand the reach of your emails and help you build your lists for the future.[click to next slide]http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-1322200-carpentry.php?st=6ca4679

Your new best friends are the forward button on your emails, the share and retweet buttons on social mediaand [click to build] the social share bar – (show a social share bar, up close if possible, on a CTCT email). If you were to scroll to the bottom of this email you’d also see [click to build] buttons allowing readers to follow the business on three different social media channels.Let’s look closer at this example. It looks good, nice layout, graphics, etc…Is marketing simply looking good? Having a pretty email?No, clearly there’s more to it…you want to look good, but colors and pictures and branding alone aren’t what make it “marketing.”[click to next slide]

Marketing has changed….maybe you’ve noticed? How many of you use [click to build] Facebook for business? How many are on Linked In? Twitter? Anyone tweetingright now? (remind of twitter handle) [click to build] Who uses Pinterest? Instagram? YouTube?[click to build] And how many have checked your email today? (all hands up) …. [click to next slide]Mobile stat from: research from:email open by platform: https://litmus.com/blog/email-client-market-share-stats-infographic-june-2012

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I love my job, I love this part of my job. Getting to talk to small businesses and nonprofits all the time. As small organizations,You actually have an advantage over “big business” that you may or may not be aware of – it is specific to your use of email and social media marketing. You have an advantage because you can be the face of the company, the person people associate with that business or organization.You can be your authentic self. Best Buy cannot do that. Pepsi cannot do that. Today we’re going to talk about someOf the ways you can leverage this advantage and also take some of the mystery out of online marketing strategies and how email and social media can help you grow your business.[click to next slide]

Look at these three words. These three words rule your world as a marketer and as a consumer or business person. Every email or social media post that you get and every one that you send or post falls into one of these three categories. Now. Later. Or Never.Think about this morning when you checked your email. Whether you were aware of it or not, you were sorting your messages into these three categories automatically. Now, later, never.And I apologize now for bringing this to your attention and making it a conscious experience for you now. For the next two or three days, when you go through your email, you will find yourself saying it out loud, “now, later, later, never, never, never” and you’ll want to curse me for making something that was seamless now very obvious to you. It will go away. But it’s important that you know that – you need to know this both as a recipient and as a sender or poster. How do you make sure that you are a now? You don’t want to be never – obviously. And a later, let’s face it, is a well-intentioned never. Right? You flag it or tell yourself, “oh, I’ll come back to that” but 9 times out of 10…do you? (they will usually laugh and say no)[click to next slide]

So how do you win the battle of priorities and get more people to stop and open your email or to stop and read your facebook post or your tweet or to share your pin on pinterest? Think about how you sort your email – or if you’re on facebook, think about the newsfeed. Typically when you open up your email – think about it this morning – you start at the top of the list and you go down, sorting by who it’s from.WHO the email or the social media post came from turns out to be the most important part of winning the battle of priorities. You do it based on WHO, so it’s important for you to [click to build] be recognizable…You do need to exercise care [click to build] and consider how you’re identifying yourself across the channels you’re using. If you send your emails as “Jane Doe,” but your Facebook page shows up in people’s newsfeeds as “Famous Cookies,” people might not make the connection. Just be sure that you’re consistent with the name you use – and ensure that it’s the one that you’ll be recognized by, so that ultimately your readers and followers will stop and open your email, read your posts – because they know they’re going to get something of value and relevance from you.Now, there are some important considerations that shouldn’t be overlooked, and they relate to something called the [click to build] “CAN-SPAM” act…which is a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations. The law makes no exception for business-to-business email. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law.One provision of CAN-SPAM is that the “from,” “to,” and “reply to,” names “must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.” Therefore if I signed up for an email from Joe Pizza the from address should be “Joe Pizza” and not “Joe Smith.”(If you have a longer session, here are more notes for talking points)If you are not sure that people will recognize you because they mostly know the company name, then use a combinationOf your name, then a comma, and then the company or brand name – so you can piggy back off of the recognition of thatBrand but knowing you’ll get more people to stop and pay attention to an email from a person.Another way to look at it – when you get an email from a company, don’t you automatically assume thatIt is a marketing message so if you are busy or going thru your own battle of priorities, that one usually goesInto the later or never pile. One other note, for nonprofits in the room, you are – and sorry to say this – often starting at later. And not because peopleDo not care about your message. That’s not it at all. It is more about the timing of your messages (which we will cover in a little bit)But if you think about it, if people are at work and their focus is supposed to be on their work, and then they get an email About your cause or program, even if they really care about it, they cannot always pull away from their primary responsiblities at the office.

Templates make the process of sending emails much easier…while still allowing you to preserve the look and feel of your brand.

Here is a simple method for writing more powerful subject and headlines. It’s called the 2-2-2 principle.Let’s walk through it quickly. The first two is for the 2 seconds you typically have to compel them to pay attention.The second two if for the first two words of your subject line or headline. That’s really all they read before making a decision.And not a decision about whether to read your message, but as to whether or not they will bother to read the rest of the subject line.The third to is for “why does this email or message matter today” Today – that’s the third two. If you can answer that questionIn your subject line or headline, as close to the first two words as possible, more people will stop and at least open your message.So – how do you do it? How do you write one of these? Is anyone here on my email list? Do any of you get my class invitations?(some will raise their hands) …have you ever noticed that my subject lines sometimes begin with something like “12 seats left for tomorrow”Or “ten seats open tomorrow”? … first, let me tell you that it’s always true. And you should always be honest in your messages as well.But the reason I start with that is because it expresses very quickly why the message matters today. Seats are running out for an upcoming session.Some of the emails I send you start with “some seats left”… ever notice those? That’s when I have a lot of seats left and I don’t want to lie to you,But I want it to be more compelling than saying “57 seats still open for tomorrow”… that’s not compelling. It’s important to point out that you don’t need to go to the “urgency well” all the time, meaning you don’t always have to put a time stamp on it orSay things like “today only” or “by close of business” or like that. It’s more about making it very clear to people that your message is relevant and timely in order to win that now, later or never battle.

When to send is another very common question. Both for how often to send and also when in terms of the time of day and the day of the week. For social media, we recommend a baseline frequency of at least 3-5 times a weekly. It’s what they used to tell us for exercise. There are tools and guidelines for what times have the highest traffic and most response but it really depends on your industry, your audience and what you are trying to get them to do.For email marketing frequency, monthly is the most common but it’s also a good idea to add unexpected messages every once in a while[click to build through the steps for testing]

To determine the best day of the week and time of day for you to send your emails, you can do an ABC test.It’s a simple method to narrow down when you get the best response and then you can adjust accordingly.First, take your list of contacts and divide it into three equal lists. So just take the whole list and break it into thirds.Next, choose three days of the week that you want to test. So – mon, wed, fri? or maybe tues, thurs, sat.(if you’re a B2B you’ll likely want to send during “regular” business hours, but know your audience in case that doesn’t hold true. For all others, it’s all up for testing)So you have three lists, and you want to test on three different days of the week.So you send your email – the same email – to each of your lists. The first group on Monday, the second group gets it Wednesday,And the 3rd group gets it on Friday. And then you measure your results. You can do this as long as you are Using an email marketing service. They tell you who opened, who clicked, what they clicked on, how many times and when.So you look at the stats and you will know which day was best of the three you tested. Now you’re ready for the second part of the process.[click to next slide]

Use the same three groups of people and now you will choose three different times of day you want to test.So, a morning, midday and afternoon or evening. The next time you are ready to send out an email,Send it on your best performing day from the last test. Send the first group their email in the morning,The second group gets it midday and the third group gets it in the afternoon or evening. And look at your stats. You will know which time of day did the best. So now you will know the best day and the best time of that day to send your emails for the best response. Please make sure you are not romanced by a high open rate. Just measuring the open rate will notGive you a clear picture of success. You might have a lot of people open it but very few take theAction you want them to take. Measure the physical, measurable responses

So now you have the best day on which to send and the best time at which to send. Excellent!! But let me caution you… [click to build] DO NOT BE ROMANCED BY A HIGHOPEN RATE – MEASURE ACTIONS!

That ability to see lots of physical and measurable response is just one reason email is so great…Turns out, email is hard to beat. It’s really where you should start – and where your clients should start when they decide to start marketing. It’s the hub of all engagement including social media marketing because it’s where you store your list and manage the graphics and store the stats on who opened your emails, what they clicked on, whether they shared it…There is an awful lot of physical, measureable response for a very low cost – relative to more traditional forms of marketing. Even if you are wrapping your own creative and project management services around our email product, it’s still a low barrier cost as compared to print, radio and payperclick.The average return on email marketing is $87 per dollar spent. Helps quell the concerns many small businesses have in terms of the value of social media. Email is so easy to measure that combining the two brings the value of social media activities up as well. Email offers a whole lot of opportunity for genuine, authentic engagement for your clients and their customers in a one-to-many tool.

Want to use this slide as a resource reminder, withVisual of engagement marketing book, text to join my listFor the presenter, visual of the workbook and a thank you

What questions do you have?(Also, please help us continue to improve these sessions by filling out the form…)[click to build] if you’re looking for more help, don’t hesitate to call one of our fantastic coaches…they’re eager to help and make things work for you.[click] and finally, if you’d like to drop me a line or follow me on Facebook or Twitter, here are my details…I’d love to hear from you and hear how your campaigns are doing!